Sunday Salon ~ reading personality

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Reading Personality Quiz

I took this reading personality quiz today, that I found in a guest feature by Joy Weese Moll of Joy's Book Blog.  And I learned that my reading personality includes all the others:  The All-Rounder.  "Your responses showed you fitting equally into all four reading personalities," I was told.  (For the record, Joy's reading personality is Eclectic Reader, which is perfect, since she's a librarian.)

• Involved Reader:  You don't just love to read books, you love to read about books.   For you, half the fun of reading is the thrill of the chase — discovering new books and authors, and discussing your finds with others.
• Exacting Reader:  You love books, but you rarely have as much time to read as you'd like — so you're very particular about the books you choose.
• Serial Reader:  Once you discover a favorite writer you tend to stick with him or her through thick and thin.
• Eclectic Reader:  You read for entertainment but also to expand your mind.   You're open to new ideas and new writers, and are not wedded to a particular genre or limited range of authors.

If you would like to find out YOUR reading personality, click this link to take the quiz.

LIBRARY LOOT

The Book of Jonah ~ by Joshua Max Feldman, 2014, fiction (New York)

The modern-day Jonah at the center of this brilliantly conceived retelling of the book of Jonah is a young Manhattan lawyer named Jonah Jacobstein.  He’s a lucky man:  healthy and handsome, with two beautiful women ready to spend the rest of their lives with him and an enormously successful career that gets more promising by the minute.  He’s celebrating a deal that will surely make him partner when a bizarre, unexpected biblical vision at a party changes everything.  Hard as he tries to forget what he saw, this disturbing sign is only the first of many Jonah will witness, and before long his life is unrecognizable.  Though this perhaps divine intervention will be responsible for more than one irreversible loss in Jonah’s life, it will also cross his path with that of Judith Bulbrook, an intense, breathtakingly intelligent woman who’s no stranger to loss herself.  As this funny and bold novel moves to Amsterdam and then Las Vegas, Feldman examines the way we live now while asking an age-old question:  How do you know if you’re chosen?

The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image ~ by Leonard Shlain, 1998

The process of learning alphabetic literacy rewired the human brain, with profound consequences for culture.  Making connections across a wide range of subjects including brain function, anthropology, history, and religion, Shlain argues that literacy reinforced the brain's linear, abstract, predominantly masculine left hemisphere at the expense of the holistic, iconic feminine right one.  This shift upset the balance between men and women initiating the disappearance of goddesses, the abhorrence of images, and — in literacy's early stages — the decline of women's political status.  Patriarchy and misogyny followed.  Shlain contrasts the feminine right-brained oral teachings of Socrates, Buddha, and Jesus with the masculine creeds that evolved when their spoken words were committed to writing.  The first book written in an alphabet was the Old Testament, and its most important passage was the Ten Commandments.  The first two commandments reject any goddess influence and ban any form of representative art.  Shlain goes on to describe the colossal shift he calls the Iconic Revolution, that began in the 19th century.  The invention of photography and the discovery of electromagnetism combined to bring us film, television, computers, and graphic advertising; all of which are based on images.  Shlain foresees that increasing reliance on right brain pattern recognition instead of left brain linear sequence will move culture toward equilibrium between the two hemispheres, between masculine and feminine, between word and image.

NOW READING

Still Life with Bread Crumbs ~ by Anna Quindlen, 2014, fiction

I'm enjoying reading about photographer Rebecca Winter, who is living in the middle of nowhere and trying to make enough to cover the bills.

Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity ~ by James D. Tabor, 2012

The Seekers class at my church is reading this one together.  I taught from chapter one this morning and will probably lead the discussion again next week.

Bloggers get together in the Sunday Salon — at separate computers in different time zones — to talk about reading.